Goodbye then!

I am going to be away for a little while, with personal reasons making it unlikely that I will be writing for sometime, maybe a couple of months. My small bunch of readers, thank you for all the kind words, and just the time spent here. I will probably start blogging again, either here, or some place else. Those of you, who feel that you would like to read me again, please drop a note here or at my mail, and I will let you know when I am back. Once again, than you, everybody!

An annual meeting

“So, you really don’t believe in absolute anything? I mean, everything in this world is relative and all that”?, I asked him a little disbelievingly.
“Well, Absolut Cranbrerry is ok with me, and maybe a few other flavours, but yeah, most other things, no, nothing absolute for me, thank you”, he replied, making light of my question.
I threw him my best withering look, which was wasted, because he just wouldn’t catch it. Still, I didn’t give up. “So everything in this world is relative, and I can just get up here and take this sharp knife and slit your throat, and that’s ok?”
“Well, not really, because that would be inconvenient for me, and quite messy. A lot of blood and all that. You don’t want to see that, believe me. Besides, I have a world to think of. So yeah, not convenient at all, but beyond that, it all depends.”

“Depends on what?”I was irritated now by all this relativity talk. In my opinion, things are always a lot simpler than what most people would like them to be. But ask most people, and no, they won’t admit it. They will rub their noses and scratch their ears and give themselves the most thoughtful airs before saying, it’s a most complicated affair. Complicated, my foot. It just makes them feel more important. I mean, who ever got the nobel for writing a book that could be understood easily?
He got up now with some effort, his thick corduroy trousers and tweed coat giving him the appearance of a man who is dressed for winter. It was most incongruous in the mild Madras winter with its twenty-eight degree chill. Going to the small study opening on to the right, he came back with an old-fashioned globe on a wooden stand. I was obviously going to be treated to a demonstration of some sort.

“You see this side of the globe”, he pointed to the part facing me, and explained slowly as though to a first-standard child. “Here is India, and to the east you can see all those small countries, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, so many of them I forget their names. Then China, and then further, Japan. And to the west of India lies Europe and then Africa and last the Americas. Always, Asia is the east, and Europe West. But just imagine, if the ones to make the first globes and the first to conquer the others had been the Asians, then I wouldn’t call Asia the east. I would look to see what is east of me, and that is what I would tag East. I wouldn’t call myself east. Just tilt the globe around, and everything changes. Everything is east of something, something is west of everything.”

It was confusing and took time to understand, but the man made some sense, I had to admit that. Still, it just didn’t tie in that he would be so funnily dressed. And his shoes! What was he thinking of! He wore knee-high boots in a shiny kind of leather, his trousers tucked into them. It didn’t even look genuine.
“Where did you get those from”, I asked him, looking at the shoes. “Is it very cold where you come from?”
“You could say that, I suppose”, he answered with a sly grin, “though I like to think that its more to do with fashion”. If this is what his fashion sense amounted to, I wasn’t too sure about his judgement on other things. Also, what if it was all just a ploy to excuse himself from any kind of responsibility. This way, he could just blame everything on relativity and scoot. Ofcourse there was a bright side to it.

“If everything is relative, then it doesn’t matter at all, that I am still not sure whether I am an atheist or an agnostic? And again, though it possibly doesn’t matter to me whether you exist or not, that too doesn’t matter, since your existence is relative?”That stumped him for a moment. In the end though, he had to agree to that and give me a truthful answer, although he gave it reluctantly, scratching the hairs on his beard sorrowfully. I consented not to stab him with my knife, and he consented to go away. I wished him a good new year and he wished me the same cordially. We agreed to meet again next year, when we would argue about something else.

Writer's block

Radhika knew that the best stories always happened at night. When she was lying awake in her bed and watching the gloomy street lamp poke fingers of light in through her window. She often considered getting thicker curtains to blot it out. But on the whole it suited her. It was not so easy to make up her stories in the daytime, when sales charts and meetings left her with no time or energy. Night served the purpose better. If she got up to write them down or key them in on the computer, she knew the light would disturb her mother sleeping in the next room. So she would try to memorize every detail as faithfully as she could, and write it down in the morning. But that was still difficult. The plots twisted themselves, the characters behaved in kinky ways, and what remained was a miserable fraction of the night’s effort. Perhaps her dreams had something to do with it.

Once she had dreamt that she was standing near a barren ground where a dark man with a scarf tied over his head was digging a grave. Large vampire bats flew around his head in swirls of psychedelic color. She knew immediately, though the dream did not mention it, that her mother was in danger. She woke up alarmed to find that the next room was empty. It took her a few minutes to realise that her mother had gone down for her morning cup of coffee. In general her dreams were fleshed out in such techni-color reality that it was difficult for the stories to sustain themselves through the night. After all, they were only figments of imagination.

Radhika knew when she was very young that she wanted to be a writer. When she had her first story published in her school magazine, her mother assured her that she was on the way. But sometime after twenty the stories stopped coming except in the occasional furtiveness of night. She had begun writing a story about a girl who lived on the seaside and fell in love with a Norwegian sailor who came to the port. But she realised that although she had lived all her life in a coastal city, she knew little or nothing about the sea. She could not say how high its waves were or what its color was or how small the ships looked when you saw them from the shore. For her, it meant only an annual excursion with her family to the beach. And that was not the end of her problems. Every time she tried to write someone else’s story, she found that the road to her head had been blocked. There was a hard packed column inside refusing to let the stories in or out. It was not an excuse or a product of wishful thinking. There it was in her chest, she could feel it, solid, symmetrical, unmovable. It did not stop her from breathing – air slid in and out of the spaces easily, but the rest was crammed with her own stories. Every cubic centimeter taken by memories, every smooth corner occupied by past events. Hurts imagined and real, misunderstanding folded up into cold politeness, disappointments, conquests, all jostled for space.

Radhika knew that she would have to be ruthless and carve these out with a surgeons knife. She had to reduce the column to zero, produce a hollow space which she could then fill with the stories of others. Inhale them greedily, churn them inside and spit them out with newly acquired panache. But the first incision was not going to be easy. . As the cliché went, writing was no child’s play, and a difficult game even when you were grown-up!

The Culture label

There has always been too little real respect for freedom in India, I feel. While that may sound like a too-broad generalisation, it isn’t. Its something I’ve observed at too many levels – at home, at work, in the daily interaction with so many different people. As a society, we seem to value order and familiarity more, which we then label under the comforting title 'culture'. Then we hold on to it with both hands, even if that means choking the life out of individual spaces and desires. .

When I was in college and staying at a paying guest house, there was a young girl who came to stay, one evening. Another student, but somehow she seemed younger, more naïve. Not yet eighteen, and married already, with a fake birth certificate produced triumphantly to get the registrar to agree. Straight out of a bollywood pot-boiler, she was actually on the run from her family, having dared to commit that crime, marry someone from another religion. Three months down the line, when I had moved away, I heard that she had killed herself unable to bear the pressure anymore. An overdose of pills, death down your gullet so smoothly. This girl came across as someone exceptionally child-like, and with little maturity to carry off a long-term relationship. Still, I could only wonder, what kind of parents did she have, who thought it was okay to lock her up in her room and beat her, which was what had made her run away in the first place.

There seems to be something wrong with a culture which places so little emphasis on the rights of young people, simply because of a veneration for age. In these days ofcourse, even saying something like this is dicey – immediately, one will be branded that lowest of all things criminal – a destroyer of Indian or Tamizh or whatever culture the protestors feel like safeguarding at the moment. But I don’t believe that belonging to any nationality or state places any obligation on me to defend its excesses. Surely the first sign of rationality or enlightenment is the ability to question. But that is not something we encourage.

In school, while planning for an excursion, a new student dared to ask our class teacher how the money being collected for the trip was being allocated. The student was simply pulled up for his impertinence, possibly to cover up deficiencies in the way the money was really being spent. The attitude was, we are teachers and we know what’s right, you will be told stuff strictly on a need-to-know basis, and again, we decide what you need to know. (Substitute teachers with parents or elders or government servants or people with more money or any such thing which confers status and power and you have more or less the same scenario). We start out at school, from our earliest days, being asked to just obey, be good children, not talk too much, learn by-heart. Very soon, if there are people still asking questions, its inspite of the system, not because of it. Not only does this system encourage us to obey, it teaches us to feel guilty even if we think of disobeying.

I am writing this, simply because all these so-called defenders of morality rising up suddenly, gives me the shivers. I am scared to be living in a country where people still hold unquestioningly that a woman’s chastity is her greatest virtue. I am petrified of living in a country where some people still think that a girl and a boy need to be ‘permitted’ to sit in a park peacefully. We are not questioning it enough, the credentials and motives of these self-styled defenders of the faith. Or atleast, there are not enough questions coming up from the people who matter. If the Tamizh industry at large had spoken up in defence of Khushboo, I doubt there would have been sufficient time and energy to build and burn effigies of each and every actor. Atleast this incident in Meerut got politicians of all hues, including Sushma Swaraj talking.

I think its time we started looking inwards and admit that just because we are Indian, our culture is not necessarily ideal in every aspect. We need to be open to change, and not view ourselves as keepers of some kind of sacred fire that will go out if we don’t keep fanning it every minute. Culture is dynamic and going to move in many different ways, irrespective of whether certain individuals see it that way. Saare jahan se accha and all that is fine, but lets not go overboard and take it too literally!

The short life of a fish

Last night I dreamt that I had morphed into a fish. I swam around a rectangular tank, my sleek propeller body cutting through the water. Point A to B and Point C to D and Point A to B. What is life, if not this endless repetition of hours, days and years? I asked myself rhetorical questions to which there was no answer, and spent my time pondering over the nature of God and the wisdom of his or her existence. I deigned to accept my fate, I rebelled against the laws of nature, I tossed about frantically between these two extremes. I worshipped Darwin, I claimed the Hand of God. And while I was doing all of this, a big hand entered the water and pulled me up, gasping, rasping. I woke up on the kitchen tale, just before the knife sliced me in two.

Free to dream

In a land very far away there lived a princess with a zycronite tiara and a sword of steel. This is not set in the time of so long ago, but in the here and now. Naturally the princess was elected to rule by popular mandate, once that thing called democracy had been brought in by a race of people called Americans. Now the Americans were not themselves the most popular people on the planet they called Earth. Still, they liked themselves better than most other people did. And that is an achievement not everyone can claim. Like I was saying, the Americans came and rigged up the democracy bits and pieces and taught everyone how to use their index finger and punch in a name on a machine. That’s all there really was to it, it seemed. And while they did that, they helped the Princess print some posters of herself with her thirty-two smiling teeth all nice and shiny, and her boobs stuck out at the right angle so that she looked appealing and well fed. You can be like me, the posters screamed, everyone will eat, everyone will get their teeth set nicely, no more cavities, no more rottenness. By then no one in the city believed anything. Still. She looked nice enough in her zycronite tiara and her sword of steel. So a few of them voted her in. It was a change from looking at pictures of fat men in beards and stiff suits who just fed people to alligators. She did have a few of those skeletons in her closet too, but hey, like the Americans say, you can’t have everything. Not in the foreseeable future. Till then, what’s to stop you from dreaming.

Murakami, an explorer of imagination...errr...what?

"Murakami is explorer of imagination", Rather unimaginative title, that one. Still, the Harvard University Gazette has a decently-readable account of Murakami's recent talk at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. Jay Rubin, who has translated much of Murakami's work into English, says something about his work, which more or less sums up my fascination with the man : "the way he deals with the big questions of life without really answering them." Some talent, that requires definitely.

The article also has some encouraging words for upcoming writers. Write more, and more, he says : The worst thing a writer can do is decide that he or she is going to write one great story. Writing is like catching a wave, and like a surfer, a writer cannot expect to catch a wave perfectly every time.

Read on here...

Falling

Every morning, I drive myself to work half asleep. I am perched on my scooter, like a little bird on the edge of a branch, wings aflutter, half waiting to fly away somewhere. This hard and lumpy body of mine, fifty odd kilos of flesh and inertia, is here, here, here, but me, I am elsewhere, moving someplace else, every place else but where I am supposed to be going. I am an instinctively cautious driver, my body attunes itself to the road even as I shut out the noise, the insane honking, the indescribable sound of a world that has forgotten how silence used to feel. In that other secret world, there is a quiet place where the sounds of silence are cherished. In that other secret world, the heart is still. The constant hankering for something, the craving for everything needed and un-needed, that unstill feeling is dead. The other secret world moves in, to a fleeting intersection of this one. I twist the accelerator with my fingers, cold flesh on warm metal and zoom on through the intersection zone. The crunch of metal, the splash of broken glass, a squirt of blood, I fall through to reality.